Start healthy habits, stop horrible habits. Can a fitness gadget assist? Should we consider the Pavlok Fitness Wristband?

Could this device - finally - be, the piece in the puzzle, the holder and helper of having a healthy lifestyle? Assuming you are, generally, in working order, and can take a “hit” the Pavlok fitness band would literally jolt your routines. If you don't do your daily activity it'll send a 340 volt into you. Theoretically you won't screw up by laying down on the job next time. Does pain pay? You'll pay between $149 to $229 to buy it, when it hits the market in 2015: but that price-point pain isn't what we're talking about. Can personal pain be a motivator?

It might be a tad hard to believe that a sudden shock would imbue motion-  when the constant shocking saga-story of a spare-tire belly and humpy-lumpy thighs hasn't done the trick. But if the latter, instead of inciting action, often invites, as we can sadly attest, lethargy and depression, perhaps a novel, painful, reminder might work. But might it not become an annoyance after a few times?

While a Pavlok prick may prove a point, the biggest point, nevertheless, is your commitment to change. Sure, some days, perhaps even inexplicably, you'll laze around, but if you aren't on your game more often than not, no device, no matter how new, how cool, or how intuitive will make an appreciable difference.

Who came up with the Pavlok fitness band? World, meet Maneesh Sethi. He’s a wilderness explorer, DJ, editor-in-chief, best-selling author, bio-hacker – and inventor. He thinks behaviors, like habits, have to be changed if one wants to meet goals. And negative feedback, literally, has its uses.

(We all have heard of positive feedback...)

Maneesh’s story: he says his productivity quadrupled when he had someone slap him for losing focus, specifically in Maneesh’s case, for venturing off into Facebook. From that in-your-face experiment he realized that the mind reacts differently to different stimuli, pro or con. He’d also make bets where he’d pay money if he didn’t do a desired task. He found such brain bending “stuff” very powerful. So, Pavlok would work for either breaking bad habits or forming new (good) habits. He gives an example of negative reinforcement. You miss work, you’d don’t get paid.  

Maneesh wondered: What makes habits “stick?” Well, literally, habits are stored in the basal ganglia part of the brain.

His idea is: new habits are hard to imprint. Therefore, for the first few days, a penalty, rather than a reward, will be used to “do” the habit. Later, the positive will “reinforce” the habit. The stick before the carrot.  It’s all thought out in what he calls the “Pavlok Habit Model.” Maneesh uses fitness for his habit example. For healthy habits to be ingrained you need 1) the ability to, say workout, five days per week, because your gym is close to work or home and 2) the motivation – knowing that if you do exercise those five days, you’ll reward yourself with a trip to a sunny spot. Let’s take his gym example. The first step is to get out of the house. The second step would be to show your gym card at the club. The third would be to exercise for 15 minutes. Habits, apparently, on average, take about 40 days to become automated and integrated. No doubt, permanent changes will take time – and effort. Maneesh reports, based on a London study of habits, that an easy habit, like drinking a glass of water after breakfast took 20 days to form. But, a hard-to-do habit, like doing fifty sit-ups after breakfast, took 84 days. (One sit-up would have taken 20 days to become habit forming.)

But – some ostensibly good habits – like exercising - can result in no improvement to one’s shape if exercises are done improperly – or if too much is done too soon with injuries following. So knowledge and common sense must be ever present.

A keystone habit would be to get active, because with this, other good things will invariably follow. You’ll smoke less. Drink less alcohol. Eat better.

The great news? Bad habits can be broken. The not so great news? Often it takes aversion therapy using negative stimulus, like shocks for smokers for example, to help break the habit. But desperate people will do “out there” things – and if it works for you, well, why not?

However, for vibration-to-shock therapy to work - one must want to break a habit. As Deepak Chopra maintains: “Once your mind begins to pay attention, your brain can build new neural pathways to reinforce…”

If you aren't on top of daily routine changes, like waking up earlier and forgoing TV or the computer at night, like taking a walk at lunch, or at least once daily, like getting friends and family members involved for inspiration, then this device probably won’t get to the bottom of why you seem to hold yourself back.

Try looking at the Pavlok Fitness Band as an adjunct to an armory of weapons used in the quest to better yourself. As an accessory, with your other ducks of diligence, dedication, and determination in a row, it could very well put you over the top in casting out bad habits and corralling in good habits instead.

A word of caution: with Apple Watch, which features fitness functionalities, coming out in 2015, it’s expected that fitness wearables will drop from 70.2 million units to 68.1 million units. No big shock. Apple is habit forming...

 

Are kids fit to live? Not if parents, schools, and lawyers have their way. Geez, the kids aren’t even fit to have fun – they’re fit to be tied.

Overbearing parents and schools are killing kids with protectiveness, leaving them without the physical and mental coping skills they’ll need as adults. Windham school in New Hampshire damned and banned Dodgeball. Apparently, kids that can’t throw well are “objectified.”

It’s sad when adults won’t let kids run a bit wild in the playground - but it’s sadder that - when they do let kids run wild - it’s with their mouths, when it’s time to eat. Here’s some food for thought.

From 12.8% to 30.1%  from 2010 to 2013. In Jakarta, Indonesia, that meteoric rise stands for the percentage of kids between 5 and 12 years old deemed overweight. Why the big ballooning? Because, amongst other factors, parents let kids eat too much junk food and “greasy” street food. (In one case a mother’s lament was that her child would have a tantrum if she tried to feed him vegetables.)

But where’s the middle ground of reasonableness and perspective? Will kids in Ohio USA specifically, at Burlington Elementary School, have tantrums now that birthdays celebrated in class will be held without birthday cakes? Gifts such as pencils and erasers are OK, notwithstanding that they taste terribly tough.

(The kids’ fits, however, will have to take a back seat to the snits of mom and dad – for their bits on the article page were vitriolic.)

It’s ironic that schools in America, whose educational standards in OECD international rankings are slipping – Huff Post Education reports that they’re now deemed “average” - focus on food and fat, not figures and facts, and deem parents too dumb to know what’s good for youngsters. (Maybe educators read the Indonesia obesity horror story.)

But, hooray, some help for youngsters, parents, and schools - thanks to scientists - may be on the way. Pointy-heads from Baltimore’s John Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health found that warning on a 500ml bottle of coke that drinking same would take a 4.2 mile run or a 42-minute walk to burn off the calories made many switch to healthier drinks, or smaller sizes of coke. They state that many of us don’t understand calories too well at best, and basically ignore caloric admonitions too much at worst.

And here’s more help, from New Zealand of all places, to turn back the “Nanny Parent” hermetically-sealed safety state. A tip of the hat goes to Principal Bruce McLachlan and his Swanson School. He abolished playground rules, knowing some kids might get hurt, a downside, but consider the upside: besides the kids having WAY more fun, they learned to think, cope, and problem solve. “There was also less bullying, less tattling. Incidents of vandalism had dropped off.”

But for the vast majority of kids they still, even after finishing elementary and high-school, will be largely untested and un-toughened. In fact, they will have been primped for adulthood, thanks, in large part, to nutty educational modes of “child-centered learning” as ruined, spoiled, generally rotten twenty-year-old tall toddlers, short on the facts of life, particularly about the hard knocks in the real world that will inevitably follow them around as night follows day.

Child-centered learning is great for boosting a kid’s self-esteem, but as a method to boost the A B C’s, it’s found wanting. And, get this, in the heartland of the USA, a school district in Nebraska, in a sop to transgendered kids, of which there are, what, one percent of the student body, if that, wanted to ban the words “boys” and “girls” in favor of “purple penguins.” That’s kooky-centered learning.

Sometimes overbearing and under caring universities intentionally create a situation where the kids are fit to play, but are made fit not to think. The University of North Carolina, in a bid to ensure its student-athletes got some good marks, steered them into sham “paper-classes” in African and Afro-American Studies where, as whistleblower Mary Willingham points out, attendance was not required. The one paper required was written, she emphasized, at an abysmally low level with students unable to write a sentence or paragraph. She said their reading skills were at a grade two or three. Nevertheless, magically, the marks averaged around A to B minus! Obviously these kids were pushed through with passes in elementary and secondary schools just because they were fast, or strong, or shifty.

And when kids do have intelligent thoughts? Well, often, American universities, in a not so nifty move, have deemed it darn near impossible for kids to voice original, not always popular – so far as their educational masters are concerned – thoughts on campus by restricting the public space in which they can orate, to “free speech zones.” Someone, please photocopy the Constitution and pass it around to those awful administrators and safe student groups whose abridgment of the First Amendment rights for all but they - with their correct opinions - is flagrant and malevolent.

While universities may be evil in banning free speech, Livermore, a New Hampshire town has gone all sinister. Halloween is now verboten. Legislatively, via a misdemeanor, free treats are no more. According to the mayor, Bob Appel, Halloween causes ‘mental harm.’  

Here are some other Halloween no-no’s for places where it’s still allowed. Skeletons should be shunned; face paint should be forbidden and nurse nylons should be nixed.

So, are kids fit to live, or have fun? Not really.

Overall it is to howl: 

Boo-Hoo...

We’re talking SUGAR DADDY syndrome. In reverse. How else to explain why every four years - so many quasi-normal democratic leaders and so many quintessentially-delusional autocratic dictators spend billions on old, rich, corruptible men and sexy athletic games?

We’re talking about the International Olympic Committee (IOC), the Olympics, and bidders “Johns”– a greasy spooning, sleazy concoction if there ever was one. With respect to the IOC, there have never been a more swelled-in-self-regard bigger bunch of cads than they. With respect to the bidders, for years they’ve had their proverbial head up their a-s. Call ‘em headlass.

Even Norway, whose international bona fides with the Nobel Peace Prizes is legion, and who has a King Harald, a member of the House of Schleswig-Holstein-Sonderburg-Glücksburg – who could -presumably - relate to the many Royal Highnesses on the IOC - has had enough. No IOC and no 2022 winter sled-fest aristocrat mess for them. They dropped out of the bidding contest.

Lord almighty, it could be Almaty. That’s in Kazakhstan. Or it could be Beijing. That’s in smog. These are the only two who will prostrate themselves enough for the IOC dignitaries to - as is their wont and want - spelunk in.  

Nobody can say the IOC doesn’t do it their way but, unlike Elvis Presley who sang “My Way” their public performances are without crowd-first emphasis, without taste, without style, without grace.

For what have they done to the Olympic Games? They've made it ruinously expensive going in and left the host country with cheap ruins going out. Greece hosted the summer Olympics in 2004. The Parthenon looks more current and kempt than do the unkempt - flourishing with weeds, shrubs, and trees - volleyball and baseball venues. The bottom of the diving pool looks like a college dorm floor after a hemp bender. Granted, the IOC can’t be responsible for babysitting facilities after the curtain goes down, but it could stop encouraging bids from countries that can’t afford ear wax, let alone Olympic Games.

But given that only China and Kazakhstan are behind the red rope, it might be fitting for the IOC to add taunting to their tray of terrible traits. Sing it loud and proud (mimicking Elvis’ last song sung live) to these two tyrannies:  “Are you Lonesome Tonight.”

IOC President Thomas Bach was a gold-medalist Olympic fencer back in ’76. If anyone can diplomatically parry, it’s he, and he isn’t freaking yet. ‘Cause hey, via the “Olympic Agenda 2020” the IOC opines that perhaps bidding countries could have a say on the games’ goings on. That’s a concept...

So, it’s rock on, Almaty! Almaty, in Kazakh, means: “the place where apples grow.” Their official website looks good enough for apples, and maybe for the 2022 Olympics. The CIA describes the country’s natural resources as “vast.” So it’s not a basket case going in like Greece almost was, and now is.

40% of the city’s population is under 24 years of age. The Kazakh website depicts more than 50% of them as being “economically active.” Perhaps economically active sounds more promising in Kazakh...For sake of argument ignore Almaty’s KIMEP University’s assertion that 100,000 people in Kazakhstan die each year because of air pollution – 20% of whom live in Almaty - because the country has cold winters – a help if one wants to have skiers shushing around town. Sochi, Russia, had six days in the Fahrenheit 60’s for its competition. There were puddles at the bottom of ski runs. It was the warmest winter Olympics on record. Why did the IOC pick a near-tropical climate Sochi to host the games again? Maybe three of Putin’s pals who, as Max Seddon of BuzzFeed News reports, were awarded contracts totaling $15 billion, put Putin up to this.

Putin’s Puttin’ On The Sochi Ritz Glitz Olympics purportedly cost over 50 billion bucks, and the lives of a lot of stray dogs who had the temerity to be caught living at the time. That’s a lot of dough and dog for a 16-day show. And now, for example, the Alpine-hosting town Rosa Khutor is abandoned.

Bet with reckless abandon on Almaty to take the Olympics. China just had the summer ones, so it might look better if the Olympics were spread around. Also, the IOC likes unaccountability so it might like the likes of President Nazarbayev – who is President for life and can hold office for eternity - so long as he wins pesky elections. The last one he won was a nail-biter-win-by-a-nose ordeal. He squeaked in with a miniscule 95.5% in 2011.

Seriously, if any leader can coerce a populace to his Olympic pretensions it’s this strongman, who has his own educational pipeline with the Nazarbayev Intellectual Schools system. Perhaps he can singlehandedly muscle back what could be a messy problem. The official website describes Almaty as “... a true mountain town with 4,000m high peaks literally flowing into the city." Shovel, anyone?

And let’s call a spade a spade. Nazarbayev has bags under his eyes. He might work for a living, unlike Vlad-the-bad-farcical-face-job Putin whose visage is weirder than a Cyclops with two eyes and calls it work when he picks fights with defense-less countries like Georgia and the Ukraine. (Why couldn't Putin, with his rumored 70 billion dollars stashed away, spring for plastic surgeons that had, at least, hand-held mirrors?)

Got off track a tad…

Let us close by reading the Book of Genesis, an about 58-page effort which portrays how a planet and people are created. Not your cup of tea? Make it be, because the alternative is to pour through the 7,000 page IOC Manual where protocol and pomp are detailed dealing with how IOC bloviators are to be cosseted on the Olympic circuit, away from their headquarters in Switzerland. That headquarters, by the way, resembles a mausoleum, except there - - - ethics go to die.  

 

 

 

Let’s not mince words or meander. Take time away from the TV. Have TV-free days. Other days limit your idiot box intake to 2 hours, maximum. If you do this NICE (the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) says it’ll be helpful for your health.

Here’s why. You won’t be sedentary, you won’t be snacking, and if you substitute in walking for watching, you will be laughing – or at least waddling less – to the bank. And you’ll be changing ingrained habits that helped get you huge in the first place. Besides, we all know, even with 100 channels to choose from “there’s nothing ever good on TV.”

For us teenagers – to get the biggest bang for our buck in a fat-loss-fitness regimen combine resistance training with cardio.

And for us of any age, stripe, or hue, make sure your parents aren't poor. According to Tetyana Pudrovska, associate professor of sociology, poverty usually equates with obesity. She avers that those who are obese are more likely to remain at the low end of the financial ladder and such a rung destines most for a fat life. Her words: “You’re already disadvantaged when you’re born to poor parents. You have no control over your obesity,” 

That’s hogwash. Everybody, save for those genetically disposed to obesity, can exert some control over their intake and output. To agree with her is to excuse all those born to poor parents. Should we sympathize as they throw their ham-hands in the air and give up? That’s crazy.

And for those kids under two who can talk without a tantrum, admittedly a small group to be sure, tell your folks to back off on the antibiotics and leave those 100 trillion microbes – body bacteria – be. Charles Bailey of the Children’s Hospital in Philly co-authored a new study that shows a link between a greater chance of obesity – to the tune of 11% to 16% depending - later on, if a lot of antibiotics were taken before the toddler reached two.

And here’s something that should scare the diapers off us all. The study said roughly 10% of two-year olds were obese, with 23% overweight.

As soon as you kids get healthy teeth, and get the go-ahead from the folks, start eating those sour tasting light-green colored Granny Smith apples. Everybody should eat them. Even when digested, their “high content of non-digestible compounds” remain in place by the time they reach the colon, which allows them to aid in creating friendly bacteria in the belly. And stock up and chow down on old-fashioned oatmeal. It also helps keep obesity at bay.

Also walk 10,000 steps daily. That first mile is about 2,000 steps.

And parents, for those kids of yours that are overweight, here are some tips to get them on the straight and narrow - slimmer anyway. Tell them that they are not alone in that you too will also change exercise and eating habits to set a good example. Then, walk the talk and literally lead them on a healthier path. Also, avoid comparing them to slimmer siblings.

And besides discouraging your offspring from drinking coffee or tea at too early an age, you might want to cut back on artificial sweeteners in yours. Dr. Gabe Mirkin writes of a study (September 2014) that shows saccharin, sucralose, and aspartame intake, in mice and humans, not only increased blood sugar levels but also changed the bacteria in intestines, allowing for more calories to be absorbed by the body from carbohydrate consumption. And higher blood sugar levels are also associated with weight gain. It may seem boring, but sticking to drinking water is good for you.

No child can determine where they live, and for folks struggling to make ends meet, it’s not easy to pick up and move to healthier locales and this may explain why, of all the states in the union, largely rural Mississippi has the highest obesity rates (35% - adults; 40% - kids) of all. While you might think that rural families would be healthier, what with fresh air, and chores, many buy processed foods from grocery stores a half-hour’s drive away because they “keep” longer than fresh foods. 

Many kids wouldn't drive, let alone walk, a half block to school if they could avoid it, but for those that go when the mood hits, fit them with standing desks to help burn calories and help bring on weight loss. 500 Texas school-kids confirmed this, by wearing a device that tracked their energy expenditure for five consecutive school days. The students, using the Stand-Biased desks, burned 15% more calories than did those students using sit-down desks.

Here’s another tip to reduce chances of obesity later on. If your family can have even just one to two meals together, weekly, while you’re an adolescent, the chance of you being overweight ten years later is reduced, because the meals tend to be healthier and the socialization skills, in protective family situations, help curb emotional overeating.  So say researchers from Columbia University and the University of Minnesota.

Finally, don’t, however, confuse obesity with poor health. The two don’t always go together. Strange as it may seem, some obese people don’t exhibit the usual, expected, harmful metabolic diseases associated with obesity. Think of Sumo wrestlers. 

Basically, to lose fat, or never put it on in the first place, start getting active. And never stop. All of us. Especially you, Sumo wrestlers. Lots of of you who retire from the sport - die within a year!

And for you,
I offer THE fitness and fat loss book:
Hugh Gives You (TM) 4 Fantastic Fitness/Fat Loss Methods To Use!
It's available from FriesenPress.com/bookstore, and Amazon, with the eBook from Chapters/Indigo's Kobo, iTunes Bookstore, Google Play, and Barnes & Noble's Nook.

It's the perfect gift.

Oh to be fat, hungry, and piggish. Not content with stuffing herself, Christina Briggs wants your money so she can keep on keeping on. She wants the government to pay her a pound for every pound she loses. 

Christina has two kids. Not sure what kind of example she’s setting for the small fry, being a self-admitted junk food eater, but the only reason anyone should give her more than a passing notice - a passing glance will be hard to avoid - is because of those kids. If she were childless, her pleas for please more government money – they call it “assistance” in the UK, should either fall on deaf ears or be treated as some kind of odd extortion/blackmail gambit.

Her argument can be boiled down to this: eating healthy food costs a lot. She has a point, eating stuff from health food stores does seem to cost more than supermarket vegetables and fruits (at least the last time I checked fifteen years ago when I bought some kind of bean salad with other indefinable ingredients and it cost me a couple of bucks more than I figured it should and would) but so what? Life ain't easy. And junk food, her main staple, is expensive. And it leaves you an addict. It’s murder, trying to refrain from eating a large bag of potato chips in one fell swoop or a two-liter carton of ice cream in one fell spoon. And all for feeling lousy and listless afterwards.

Of course we must have some sympathy with her buyer-beware purchasing philosophy. Many Brits will remember the horsemeat “horsegate” scandal of a couple of years back when it was discovered processed foods being advertised as ‘containing’ beef were actually containing 100% horsemeat. The government is being urged to form a new food-crime unit.

Meanwhile, 5’7” Christina, who gets 20,000 pounds a year from the government – and lives in something called a council house (social housing) – and spends 300 pounds monthly on junk food, her faves being crisps and chocolate, says she can’t afford a gym.

So take a hike. Walk.

Take a kid. Heck, take two. Double your fun.

At her 25-stone size (159 kilos, 351 pounds) walking will be about the only exercise safe and doable for her. Now, walking isn’t a sexy quick fix. But it is inexpensive if one avoids the temptation to buy NBA brand named sneakers, and picks instead a basic shoe from Wal-Mart (ASDA) that costs around $20 dollars. Perhaps, living in Wigan, a town between Liverpool and Manchester, she can amble, knowing that the temperatures don’t get too hot in the summertime – around 20 degrees Celsius – or too cold in the winter – around 3 degrees. But carry an umbrella, Christina, because it does rain, on average, around 17 days every month.  

If she’s unfamiliar with the best places to walk, here are some Wigan walking routes.

Granted, it’s highly unlikely she has time to read, what with two kids, and it is, unfortunately, even more unlikely she’ll take steps to personally address her sorry state, but nobody can say we didn't try to help. 

If we take this one step further, assuming paying Ms. Briggs money for being big is the right thing to do, does that mean that the other 64% of Englishmen and women deemed overweight or obese should get pounds for their pounds?

Basically, society should not fork over cash so she can change what she forks with. She’s a, no pun intended, big girl. She can look after herself. 

One must, however, give her kudos for getting her story out to the press. If one wants to beg and glom handouts from the state, get the media to grease the skids. Enterprising, that.

Given that she’s publicizing her situation, she’s asking for feedback. In this picture from the Daily Mail, her hair is a strikingly off-the-beaten-track orangey color. Maybe she could save some money, leaving her hair in its au naturel state.

She, naturally, with her quest to get taxpayer dough for every pound she loses, has a unique alms ploy. But what about this play? Apparently her son and daughter have different dads. Maybe they can help pay for the kids, or take the kids off her hands. 

And what is it anyway with British blobs and their deep seated deep-dish desire to have others pay to change their lives? Have you heard of Paul Mason? He’s the guy who, back in 2011, lost 40 stone, or 560 pounds. But he felt hard-pressed. He wanted, therefore, fellow citizens to pitch in so he could get a doctor to shed his excess skin.

Meet American, Rebecca Mountain. She digs Paul Mason. She and Paul set up a shed-the-skin-surgery online fundraising page, their target: 16,000 pounds. And that’s for drugs and travelling to the US where a doctor would surgically shed the seven stone of skin - for free, or for a song, or for publicity, one might suppose. (A Dr. Jennifer Capla has met with Paul.) 

Paul, however, forgot to tell the USA authorities about a 1986 fraud conviction. So Homeland Security is holding up his medical visa.  

Let’s end with Christina’s vista, decrepit though it is. Then let’s, in the karma-spirit of Christina, go out and stuff ourselves with buffets at every hotel on the Las Vegas strip and stick our unloved co-worker, neighbor, semi-friend or successful sibling with the bills.

‘I just get enough money to live on - the taxpayers should help fund my diet.’